Staring at Vienna’s imposing facades and reflecting on its civilized way of life will never be enough to fully appreciate the ingenuity at play in this multilayered city or the extent of its broader legacy. Without a special focus and deliberate contemplation it is easy to overlook one of the most important historical ingredients that helped shaped Vienna – its secret sauce, really – one integral to the intended recipe but no longer discernible in the fully baked cosmopolitan mix of this great metropolis. I am talking about the immense intellectual and commercial contribution of its Jewish contingent. This narrow but exceptionally productive slice of Vienna’s demographic was a true exponent of its intellectual brilliance and cultural fluorescence that illuminated human action far beyond the capital – it is Vienna’s Jews that have largely defined the modern world of music, psychoanalysis, philosophy, medicine, politics, economics, art, architecture, and literature.
Vienna 1900 – as the birthplace of modern art and ideas in almost every field of human thought and activity – has become a broadly disseminated topic popular among Western cultural historians. It defined a period of elasticity and interrelatedness of culture, of unprecedented triumph of liberal thought exercised freely in a cosmopolitan city at the center of a multiethnic Empire, whose influence would transcend the small-minded limitations of coercive totalitarian nation state that followed, at least among intellectuals.
Vienna’s symbolic power and concentration of political, social, and artistic energy at the time of Franz Joseph’s inclusive and tolerant reign of 68 years (the longest of any Habsburg ruler and one of the longest in history) has secured for this city an impressive share of the world’s intellectual legacy. During the Grunderzeit period from 1848 to the turn of the century, when Vienna’s population rose five-fold – an impressive increase given the city size – its Jewish population saw an increase of 35 times to 9% of its total, their important role in the middle class and the Viennese society as a whole was echoed in lesser cities of the Empire.
Vienna’s cultural elevation to the rank of the world’s greatest cities was facilitated by many factors but is inseparable from the emancipation, advancement and contribution of its Jews. The list of leading Jewish contributors to Viennese culture is very broad and impressive given its 5% share of population. Stephan Zweig agrees: “nine tenth of what the world celebrated as Viennese culture in the nineteenth century was a culture promoted, nourished, or even created by Viennese Jewry” and “…much if not the most of all that Europe and America admire today as an expression of new, rejuvenated Austrian culture, in literature, the theater, in the arts and crafts, was created by the Viennese Jews who, in turn… achieved the highest artistic performance of their millennial spiritual activity.” They were “the audience, they filled the theaters and concerts… visited the exhibitions… and with their more mobile understanding, they were the champions of all that was new.”
The concentration of Jewish intellectual talent in late 19th century Vienna rivals that of the end of the 18th when the city commanded attention as the world capital of classical music with so many top names – from Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn and Schubert to Liszt, Brahms and Strauss – composing and performing there at the same time, sponsored by the likes of Gottfried van Swieten and princes Joseph Lobkowitz, Karl Lichnowsky, Nikolaus Esterhazy, and Andrei Razumofsky. Only now Jewish intellectuals and patrons of the arts filled the role traditionally played by aristocracy and the court.
To be clear, the founding members of Vienna’s most famous movements were not Jewish – supported by wealthy Jewish patrons and financial backers, yes, with strong ties to Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie, but not Jewish, and beyond the household names, a roll call of Vienna’s narrowly recognized inventors and elite scientists does not appear very Jewish:
- Gustav Klimt, Otto Wagner (Secession), Schiele, Kokoschka (Modernism), Adolf Loos, Josef Hofmann, Koloman Moser (Wiener Werkstatte),
- Carl Menger (founded Austrian School of Economics), Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk (finance minister of Austrian Empire), Friedrich von Wieser,
- Ludwig Boltzmann and Ernst Mach (founded positivist philosophy), Alexius Meinong,
- Simon von Stampfer and Franz von Uchatius (invented motion picture projector and helped develop cinematography),
- Wilhelm Kress and Hermann Oberth (airplane and space rocket pioneers),
- Erwin Schrodinger (won the Nobel prize for quantum wave and work in many fields of physics).
A look beyond the household names reveals the city’s close link to the Jews, decidedly skewed towards the intangible cultural domains: many of the Austrian giants of literature, philosophy, social sciences and the arts, now widely renowned in their fields, had Jewish roots – many interacted, debated and competed for attention in real time in Vienna’s literary cafes and theaters during roughly the same period:
- Jews gave Viennese literature the European standing it simply did not have in prior periods. The list of Jewish contributors to literature who were born in Vienna or lived there for at least two decades includes 238 published men of letters – and as many as 500 writers of Jewish descent counting a broader population of essayists, satirists, journalists, and playwrights
- Writers/essayists/critics/masters of small form: Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Beer Hoffmann, Josef Roth, Stephan Zweig, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Hermann Bahr, Peter Altenberg, Alfred Polgar, Hermann Broch, Franz Werfel, Felix Salten, Anton Kuh, Edmund Wengraf. Robert Musil stands apart from all others – an early 1900s renaissance man educated in mechanical engineering, psychology and philosophy, whose precision, wit and insight make his 1,800-page novel read a rare intellectual delight
- Journalists/editors: Moritz Szeps (owner of Neues Wiener Tagblatt, leading liberal daily and a friend of Crown Prince Rudolf, Emperor’s son), Moriz Benedikt (editor-in-chief and owner of Neue Freie Presse, famous for its journalists Max Nordau, Theodor Herzl, both founders of Zionism, and Felix Salten), Friedrich Austerlitz (editor of Arbeiter Zeitung)
- Zionists: Theodore Hertzl, Max Nordau, Martin Buber, Nathan Birnbaum
- Philosophers: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Otto Weininger, Theodor Gomperz, Hans Kelsen, Edmund Husserl, Karl Popper, Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank, Max Brod
- Medicine/Psychiatrists: Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Max Graf, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
- Economists/sociologists: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig Gumplowicz
- Future leaders: Leon Trotsky, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Joseph Stalin
- Jurists/criminologists/countless social democratic leaders of Jewish origin – not worth repeating here
- Statesmen/legislators/ministers: Joseph Unger (life member of the House of Lords), Emil Steinbach (both Unger and Steinbach were presidents of the Supreme Court), Julius Ofner (member of Parliament and the Supreme Court of Austrian Empire and its successor post WWI)
- Music composers/conductors: Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Oscar Strauss, Leo Fall, Guido Adler, Imre Kalman, Alban Berg, Erich Korngold, Anton von Webern
- Theater: Sonnenthal, Max Reinhard
- Inventors: Siegfried Marcus, inventor of the world’s oldest automobile in Vienna in 1864 who leveraged world’s earliest discovery of oil in Austrian Galicia to use gasoline to power his internal combustion automotive engine.
Jews in the Austrian Empire were able to emancipate more fully and reach greater heights on the social, political, and even military ladder than elsewhere in Continental Europe:
- After the enlightened reforms of Joseph II in 1780s and efforts of Joseph von Sonnenfels, one of the leaders of Austria’s Jewish Illuminati movement, Jews were emancipated and even allowed to own property.
- Thanks to this emancipation, by 1910, Jews peaked at 43% of teaching faculty and for nearly half of Viennese doctors, 62% of lawyers, or 33% of the student body. Jewish presence in the highly productive and competitive Vienna reached far beyond the traditional incumbency of banker, lawyer, doctor, art critic, and journalist – a nearly universal development in professional Central Europe at the time. Austrian Jews were also prominent among industrialists and artists, the underlying producers of tangible and intangible goods, they sponsored the arts, and supported education, and shaped, both deliberately and inadvertently, Central Europe’s liberal press, public opinion, and high culture.
- Jewish presence among imperial judges, including at the highest level, and among members of Austrian parliament is noteworthy. It was Jews who codified civil and criminal laws of the Habsburg Empire and introduced social legislation at the end of the 19th century.
- Most Austrian and most loyal of the Habsburg subjects, Jews were unburdened by petty territorial disputes or limitations of narrow political activity, Jews had the freedom to be worldly and supranational and were predisposed to everything modern and innovative in the cultural world, offering a preview of later migration to America.
- Jews not only spoke but help develop and refine the German language, covering a broad range from conversion to assimilation to Zionism, some showing Catholic leanings, others choosing Protestant virtues. They provided the core of liberal base, the professional class and bourgeoisie. Many remained Jewish, and some were ennobled by the decent and unprejudiced Emperor for outstanding social or commercial achievements (including Friedrich von Hayek and Hugo von Hofmannsthal).
Uncharacteristically, Jews were overrepresented even among the commanding ranks of the Imperial Royal Army.
- No army in the world had produced more Jewish officers than the Austro-Hungarian Army, one of the most interesting institutions in military history where officers had to be able to give commands in 11 languages besides German (this Army fought for the dynasty, which aroused genuine affection among citizens, not for some state institution, and outlasted the dynasty itself, continuing to fight tenaciously despite major battle setbacks and suffering the worst casualties of any major power, 90% of soldiers).
- Jews made up 5% of population of the Empire but produced 25,000 Habsburg officers or 9% of the Imperial & Royal Army total, almost 19% of reserve officers, 78 rabbis with the rank of captain, and 24 generals, including commanders of elite mountain regiments and Jewish-Muslim regiments fighting in the Balkans. The Jewish concentration among officers reflects relatively better education and points to an element of meritocracy in the old fashioned army where tradition and pomp favored the aristocrat.
- This inclusiveness was unique among great powers – Jewish officer commissions were negligible in Britain and France, no longer found in Prussia after Napoleonic wars, and nonexistent in the Russian imperial army. In total, 300,000 Austrian Jews served in the Habsburg military during WWI, making it the only major army in the world where Jews were overrepresented.
- This was not a new development either – as far back as 1780s Austria was the first country in Europe to conscript Jews as soldiers, and Joseph II was the first Christian ruler to attack medieval restrictions that burdened the Jews, amid his general emancipation of the Jews and other progressive reforms.
The Ringstrasse itself, 19th century Europe’s premier urban megaproject, was inseparably linked to the Jews.
- The Ring may have been sponsored by the Emperor and executed by Europe’s best architects but its links to the social advancement of the Jewish elite of the Austrian Empire are undeniable. Conceived effectively as an informal partnership of the court and prominent bankers, the Ring was a triumph of emancipation, formal equality, and economic indispensability of the Vienna Jew, asserting his new secular role in a world capital.
- The most prestigious and exclusive boulevard in the Empire housed only 55 exquisite private properties, of which 44 lots – at the best locations not reserved for civic buildings – were initially acquired and occupied by wealthy Jewish owners who were also public patrons of the arts. Taken over the period from 1860 to 1905, the market share of Jewish buyers of the Ringstrasse properties moderated from the initial 80% to 50%, remaining at a very impressive multiple of the Jewish share of Vienna’s population.
- The Ringstrasse zone and its historicist plan was about fabrication and regulation of a great modern city on an industrial scale – and with impeccable attention to detail – that was precision-matched to one of Europe’s highest density medieval centers. Prior to the development of the Ring, during Vormarz, Jewish nouveaux riches usually lived in rental apartments scattered throughout Vienna – with a notable exception of Pereira’s rebellious, purpose-built, city block size apartment building off the Ring, near Freiung, Vienna’s thoroughly aristocratic square, by Ludwig Forster, one of Vienna’s greatest. Now they built, owned, and rented to others, palatial apartments on the Ringstrasse alongside palaces built by the dukes of Wurttemberg and Coburg and archdukes Ludwig Viktor and Wilhelm. This residential development of the Ringstrasse preceded the completion of the iconic public buildings lining the same boulevard by a decade and a half.
- Great Jewish rent palaces filled nearly all the space between the grand public buildings hosting symbolic power and cultural institutions on the Ringstrasse – Palais Todesco, Palais Schey von Koromla, Palais Ephrussi, Palais Lieben, Palais Ofenheim. Jewish bankers and businessmen – Pereira, Arnstein and Ekeles, Rothschild, Konigswarter, Warrens, von Haber, Todesco – were early supporters of the Imperial Family’s project of building the boulevard, 50 years before it was launched. These Jewish families – the buyers of the first building lots auctioned off along Kartnerring section near Schwartzenbergplatz – were joined shortly thereafter by archdukes Ludwig Viktor and Wilhelm, the dukes of Wurttemberg and Coburg, and Count Lutzow and Krinsky.
- It is hard to believe today these imposing city block size facades were once private residences, their richly sculpted, paneled, and frescoed historicist interiors were dressed up by their Jewish owners for maximum outward impact on the Ringstrasse masterplan rather than individual expression. Ringstrasse is where Jews started to lose their fascination with orientalism that prevailed in their public and private structures prior to 1860s.
- Jewish residential palaces of the boulevard did not try to create a Jewish townscape but achieved the opposite – Jews helped define the cosmopolitan visual identity of liberal Vienna as we know it today, that of dignified Greco-Roman antiquity. This was pure assimilation – but of active, forceful, and assertive variety – defining and shaping the cityscape and the way of life, not simply trying to fit in.
- No longer in search of their own identity, they embraced the cosmopolitan Ringstrasse mix of Venetian Renaissance exteriors and Florentine Renaissance interiors more suitable for the modern apartment building. This was also more conducive to further development of literary and musical salons hosted by the wives of Jewish bankers, a tradition that dates back from the time before the start of the Ringstrasse or the ennoblement or emancipation of the Vienna Jews.
- Modern apartment building, main Jewish contribution to Vienna’s built environment born in rental palaces of the Ringstrasse, became a very popular export happily embraced in other major cities of Europe and in New York, and the main Jewish contribution to architectural history.
- Ringstrasse’s Jewish sponsorship was echoed in style and substance along Budapest’s Andrassy street where 90 out of 130 landowners of the new patrician residences were Jewish. Jewish patrons sponsored entire blocks lined by monumental apartment buildings across many European cities of the time – but only Vienna had them displayed along its most prestigious boulevard, elbow to elbow with the highest institutions of the Empire.
- Jewish patrons’ were not lacking in top names when it comes to architects they commissioned for their projects. Many were designed by Theophil von Hansen himself, one of the chief architects of Ringstrasse era who also built the Arsenal and many of the iconic monuments along the boulevard, modeled on classical Athens and early neoclassical palaces of Ludwig I’s Munich – the Parliament, the Musikverein, the Stock Exchange, the Academy of Fine Arts. Across the Kartnerstrasse from the Eastern flank of the Statsoper is one of Ringstrasse’s earliest Jewish rental palaces, the block-long Palais Todesco, built by Hansen for the highly cultured family of Vienna’s leading bankers (nest to the Rothschilds and the Konigswarters) in the dignified ideal of Venetian Renaissance exterior and Florentine Renaissance interiors. Also by Hansen is Palais Ephrussi, a five story tall, 16 windows wide structure with corner towers at Ringstrasse and Schottengasse, crowned by 13 full-story-high caryatids along the top floor, it served as the Vienna base of the Russian Jewish family that made their fortune in Odessa as the world’s largest grain traders before moving in the footsteps of the Rothschilds to establish their business and finance empires in Vienna and Paris, main capitals of the 19th century Europe. Another architect of Ringstrasse’s Jewish residences was Forster, his predecessor, well-known for his prominent public projects. An audacious palace built by a Jewish patron sits on a site facing the Ring right between the NHM Museum and the Parliament, the only residence along the section of the boulevard occupied exclusively by the Continent’s most monumental institutional buildings and one of its largest Imperial palaces.
Stating the obvious, Vienna lost most its role and content with the loss of its Empire, its crownlands, its great power status.
- A mass exodus of its intellectuals, the expulsion and deportation of its Jews following Anschluss and during the Holocaust, reduced the imperial city to a beautiful shell for several decades.
- Only recently it started to regain its edge, to leverage its rich artistic legacy, multiethnic tradition, and geography – albeit with no court to provide patronage, no Metternich’s political smarts, no Schwarzenberg’s military genius, no Klimt at the Academy of Fine Arts, no Freud at the University, no Mahler at the Opera, and no Jews.
- Now imagine the intensity of experience in this city had it remained the capital of a major power, vibrancy of its Jewish intellectual base and patronage intact.
- Stylistic plurality and creativity of Vienna benefitted from the extreme cultural heterogeneity of its urban society and the linguistic diversity of its crownlands. Foreigners represented about 6% of Paris population in 1900 but over 60% in Vienna. The multiethnic and polyglot setting of its liberal Empire – it contained innumerable linguistic and cultural minorities – allowed for reciprocal influence and exchange, for the development of multiple personalities that are difficult to imagine at the great capitals of Western European nation states.
Vienna and its monarchy has become a case study of multiple ethnicities coexisting and functioning relatively successfully in a liberal constitutional sovereign entity, without any single ethnicity dominating or asserting its power on the minorities –
- The Habsburgs managed ethnic issues relatively well – their remaining domains now much reduced, shifted to the East, and made significantly more multilingual by the self-determination of the Netherlands, the partitions of Poland, the formation of independent Belgium, Cavour’s backing for Garibaldi’s war of Italian independence and Bismark’s unification of Germany.
- They did it infinitely better than their ethnically monolithic successor states and better than any neighboring state did before WWI. The Empire represented the cosmopolitan golden age, its German core, Slavic majority, and large Magyar population were in balance, every major crownland had two or more major ethnic groups with comparable access to power, offering meaningful security to minorities – and more so on the Austrian side of the Dual Monarchy, where all ethnic groups represented in provincial and central parliament or given equality of language.
- After 1860 Galicia enjoyed significant autonomy, and a number of the top positions in the joint Imperial & Royal government were given to its Polish nobility (count Kasimir Badeni, count Alfred Potocki, count Aegenor Goluchowski) in exchange for their guaranty of loyalty. By the same token, the industry was run by the Czechs, the military by the Croats. After 1867, Hungary had full autonomy in its internal affairs except for the army and the navy, foreign policy and the customs union.
- It is no secret that Lenin and Trotsky sought solutions to the ethnicities question from the experience offered by the Austrian Empire. The ethnic policy of the Soviet Union borrowed certain principles despite the fact that execution deviated from the original design – but that is another topic. Despite many failed policies, misguided ideology, and Russia’s hegemonic status, it was not a racist nation state that went after its ethnic minority groups, at least officially. This direct departure from Russian Empire’s intolerance was a page taken from book of the Habsburg Empire.
- Western nation states viewed such tolerance as a weakness they could leverage to undermine Austria-Hungary in the struggle for power on the Continent. The consensus – Vienna and the Empire as a tired, decaying anachronism – was no doubt written by victors, or at least influenced by efficient centralized nation states that rushed to dismember the Habsburg domains in the WWI peace settlement. Such old and simplistic clichés that prevailed for decades among historians are being slowly but surely revisited today.
- The final outcome in 1919, promoted by the French, contradicted the more rational plans of the Americans and the British that consisted of preserving and even enlarging the Habsburg Empire in order to stabilize central Europe against future Russian and German aggression. This was a misguided act of ignorant export of ideals by the OG among nation states in an attempt to replace liberal, multiethnic, supranational entity that had enjoyed superior living standards and more tolerant rule. Realization and regret came too late, when nearly all of the small minded and dependent successor nation states turned chauvinist, fascist or lost independence, in both cases minorities quickly losing their legal protection.
- The debate about coercive monoethnic nation state vs melting pot based on an idea continues, and is at least as relevant today as ever. Populist sentiment against globalization remained isolated and limited within the Empire – after the mishandled settlement it turned into populist backlash that brought in first Mussolini then Hitler and racial laws. In today’s world that is closer to a pre-WWI state of mind than ever, what is becoming increasingly clear is that in Central Europe multiethnicity was of the solution, not the problem, and forced conversion to one-dimensional nation states – the problem not the solution.
